The Contemporary Art Blog from Canberra

The interweb is filling up with commentary on Ai Weiwei’s (and others’) detention on April 3rd. I’ve been adding them to this post (at least those I find are contributing new information and commentary) as they have come in. It started here on April 3rd in the NYT. And then in the WSJ here. And at ArtInfo. And on TED. And the New Yorker blog. And the New Yorker essay. And now on Voice of America. And Lebbeus Woods: This Cannot Pass. And ABC Arts. And Holland Cotter in the NYT. And the WSJ again. Even Bianca Jagger at Huffington Post. Then CNN reporting the Chinese official response. And The Guardian’s version of the same. And a petition on ArtDaily. And The Guardian again on his “economic crimes”. And The Australian. And at Bloomberg. Plus The Financial Times. Then Ben Davis on ArtInfo and a Friday update here.  And now this open letter (with a zillion signatures) in The Guardian. And more from Beijing by Evan Osnos at The New Yorker. And now a change.org petition. The Irish Times. ArtDaily reports on continuing Chinese Government intransigence. April 10: It’s “killing the chicken to scare the monkey” says Jaime FlorCruz on CNN. And see Newsweek. And the Herald Scotland

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April 11: apparently now it’s about obscenity (Michael Sheridan, The Oz): is this the offending image, on China Digital Times? It’s none of your business, China tells the West (Telegraph). And criticism of Bob Dylan, in The Times (Joe Joseph). April 12: He’s now rendered invisible, see Probe International (with more links). And Sean Wilentz defends Bob Dylan in the New Yorker. As does Jonathon Jones, in The Guardian. And Ian Crouch, again in the New Yorker. PBS Newshour summary here. April 13: The Christian Science Monitor. And where is Wen Tao, disappeared at the same time, at Huffington Post? April 14: The Guardian reports on contradictory invitations offered to AWW just prior to his arrest. Deutsche Welle reports on German debates about the purpose of the current exchange: The Age of the Enlightenment. And read here, in further detail. Colin Jones, the producer of the upcoming film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, also gives an insider’s account at Dissent.

April 15: Art Info summarises the various rumours and responses. And there’s a world-wide sit-in planned for this Sunday, reported in the L.A. Times. April 16: Now The Guardian reports on other associates being arrested. And see The Committee to Protect Journalists. Michael Sainsbury, in The Australian, (“Brutal flipside of economic success”) points out that Julia Gillard will be put on the spot when she visits China next week. And see Austin Ramzy, in Time Magazine. April 17: NPR publishes an interview article by Laura Sydell. And see designboom. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reported as having made a personal plea to the Chinese Government for Ai Weiwei’s release. The NYT reports that 54 people have been detained during the current crackdown. A revealing interview with German architect of the Chinese National Museum, Meinhard von Gerkan at Spiegel Online. April 18: reportage on some of the demonstrations around the world on The Age here. And here on the blog WNYC. April 19th: read Ma Jian at Day by Day (The Day Weekly Digest) on the symbolic values of the sunflower seeds. And read Ben Evans who ruminates on the effects of the NY protest here at Art Info. The NYT watches the German angst over their Beijing exhibition The Age of Enlightenment. Maybe this gaggle of U.S. Senators will raise the issue. “It’s a tinderbox… it’s all about to blow” says Will Hutton, interviewed here by Ali Moore on the ABC. April 20th: ArtInfo reports that change.org, the host of the AWW petition, was brought down by a denial of service attack. In Australia, press reports quote Prime Minister Julia Gillard as having said: ‘We regularly raise human rights and in a broad set of discussions I will raise human rights.” The Guardian’s Tania Branigan reports today that Ai Weiwei’s lawyer, Liu Xiaoyuan is no longer in detention. The Economist sees the purge of public intellectuals, reporters and lawyers as a reflection of the nervousness of the leadership. And Charlie Finch at artnet argues the comparison with fascist Germany in the 1930s. See and read Alison Klayman on Frontline (with Hillary) drawing attention to the breadth of the purge. April 21: The Guardian on the change.org hack attack. AFP reports that the US government has reiterated its concerns at the “extralegal detentions”. April 22: AFP reports the departing US Ambassador Jon Huntsman reiterating his call: “It is very sad that the Chinese government has seen a need to silence one of its most innovative and illustrious citizens,” he said in a written introduction to the artist, who is also a staunch activist, published by Time. “Ai… has shown compassion for his fellow citizens and spoken out for victims of government abuses, calling for political reforms to better serve the people,” Huntsman, who is due to leave his post in the next few days, added. “For the world, Ai continues to represent the promise of China.” Chinese Human Rights Defenders publish a list of those missing. April 24: AFP reports another significant Art Citizens demonstration in Hong Kong. Reported by BBC TV news.  Human Rights Watch asks Gillard to step up. And here’s VoA’s latest.  And meanwhile (Evan Osnos reports in the New Yorker) the Chinese Government exhorts the populace to be happy. April 27: The Asia Society references an instance of the use of parody to get around censorship. The Swiss Interior Minister, Didier Burkhalter, is reported as having raised the issue, and more forcefully than the Australian PM, it seems. And here’s an anonymous Chinese contributor to the austere Wesleyan Argus. Reuters reports the Chinese government’s warning that discussion of human rights is a “tool to meddle”, suggesting that something got lost in translation? Here’s the Asia Society’s Melissa Chiu speaking to CNN. On the U.S. Asia Law Institute (NYU School of Law) site Jerome A. Cohen unpacks the possible legal scenario(s) facing Ai Weiwei. April 28: Martin Gayford at Bloomberg asks whether, if Ai Weiwei is still in custody, the Chinese participation at the Venice Biennale (opens June 4) will be a focus for art world action. Tania Branigan reports today in the Guardian that two of Ai Weiwei’s oldest friends, Zuoxiao Zuzhou and Xiao Li have been detained at Shanghai Airport. It may be coincidental, but Zuoxiao Zuzhou yesterday published an article “Who doesn’t love Ai Weiwei?”, in the Hong Kong newspaper Mingpao. And in the context of the German exhibition in Beijing, The Age of Enlightenment, the NYT’s Didi Kirsten Tatlow compares Ai Weiwei’s circumstances to that of Voltaire… April 29: Geremie Barmé writes this incisive and informed essay on Ai Weiwei’s predicament on The China Beat. April 30: Read Barmé’s conclusion, and then: Jamil Anderson reports on Xu Bing’s “apolitical” stance. And then Chen Danqing, Ai Weiwei’s friend, interviewed in the LAT. May 1: The Chinese Embassy in London writes that this has nothing to do with freedom of speech, etc. (Ben Balnchard, at Reuters). And here (Peter Foster, The Telegraph) specifically in response to Salman Rushdie. Ai Weiwei’s wife and colleagues make their claims in this open letter to the authorities. And here is a dedicated blog: freeaiweiwei.org. Australia’s voice remains silent on Ai Weiwei’s disappearance. In its own Open Letter, iconophilia asks whether the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard will have anything to say about Ai Weiwei when she visits China? And the answer is: not much, politely. A Chinese police officer, right, and a security guard stand outside the entrance to Ai Weiwei’s studio in Beijing Sunday, April 3, 2011. China blocked Ai Weiwei, one of its most famous contemporary artists, from taking a flight to Hong Kong on Sunday and police later raided his Beijing studio, the man’s assistant said. AP Photo/Ng Han Guan. Quotes: “The state is taking action against people who have peacefully demonstrated their ideas. They are writers – all they did is to express their minds through the internet. So the pattern is very clear. The state tries to maintain stability by crushing any thought of making change,” Ai says. “It could happen to me, because I did the same thing and in many cases I went much further and deeper. But I always think the government can learn from their mistakes – they should learn and should understand; they should be just as intelligent as anyone else. I have to be wishful [optimistic] in that sense.” (see Tania Branigan, in the Guardian, 18 March 2010) “So what is my activity? My activity is very simple, asking basic rights for people to freely express themselves and also to find a new structure, a new way of communicating. Because I’m an artist and this is what I do and I believe in that.” (CNN) “How can you predict what’s in a dictator’s mind?” he asked. “You know if you really think about them you are already a victim of them.” (npr) “They put you under house arrest, or they make you disappear,”‘ Ai Weiwei said in an interview. “That’s all they can do. There’s no facing the issue and discussing it; it’s all a very simple treatment. Every dirty job has to be done by the police. Then you become a police state, because they have to deal with every problem.” From Art Info 7 April: – Love the Future Indeed: In China, where countless government agents patrol sites behind the Great Firewall for any offending political content (and where telephone conversations are so closely monitored that some trigger phrases can immediately disconnect the call), it takes some creativity to voice opposition. The fact that even sympathetic publications universally self-censor to avoid reprisals is a sad problem too. So to rally citizens to protest the detention of Ai Weiwei, online commentators have taken up the slogan “Love the Future,” (爱未来) which both resembles and sounds similar to Ai’s name (艾未未). Calls range from the energetic (“To love the future is to love yourself. Fill the microblogs with love. Fill the motherland with love. Donate your love to the future of the motherland.”) to the despondent (“I really don’t dare believe that in this society, even love for the future can disappear”). [China Digital Times] AWW quoted in the Australian: “Dissidents are criminals. Only criminals have dissident ideas. The distinction between criminals and non-criminals is whether they have dissident views. If you think China has dissidents, you’re a criminal. The reason China has no criminals [dissidents?] is because they have already become criminals.” And from Bloomberg (above): Departing U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman said yesterday America will defend the rights of Chinese human rights activists such as Ai and jailed Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. Future ambassadors “will continue to speak up in defense of social activists, like Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng and now Ai Weiwei, who challenge the Chinese government to serve the public in all cases and at all times,” Huntsman said in a speech in Shanghai. And, now, in The Age (7th April) there’s a story about “The Initiators and Organisers of the Chinese Jasmine Revolution” who are said to be the people who first launched the idea of a peaceful revolution on February 17. And Bob Dylan (on tour in China) appears to have accepted censorship of his playlist, and has kept his mouth shut over AWW. Great photograph in The Australian here. And reported here in the Washington Post. And for related ambient experiences, read Bill Shiller, at the Toronto Star. A slideshow of AWW’s work has been posted by The Washington Post. And here’s Imagine’s Without Fear or Favour on YouTube. From which these marble surveillance cameras were snapped:

Unofficial war art? War zone street art? Even if you’re familiar with the work of recent official Australian war artists (for example, in war zones, Charles Green and Lyndell Brown, or Shaun Gladwell, and in peacekeeping zones, Jon Cattapan and eX de Medici) you’re unlikely to have seen what the soldiers themselves are up to. Only from George Gittoes’ movies (notably Soundtrack to War, shot in Iraq in 2004) do we gain some sense of the culture of everyday life for members of the armed services in such arenas as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Unofficial war art is another thing altogether. Here we see the work of the stencil artist ZEROSIX downtown in the Kandahar ISAF base. While you might say that the work of the official war artists is largely a matter of matching their highly protected experiences of being embedded against their existing personal styles and strategies, in this case it is the vernacular of street artists like Banksy and others which provides a set of visual conventions for ZEROSIX and others to work with.

David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club – based on a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk – created the character Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), who is also ambiguously the narrator of the film. While Fincher makes no claims for Tyler’s beliefs – “[the] movie couldn’t be further from offering any kind of solution” -  here ZEROSIX revisits Tyler’s values in a much more challenging context.

The Kandahar base is a massive fortress housing approximately 30,000 personnel. Its incongruous village-like atmosphere (the boardwalk, the fast food franchises) was criticised last year by the “notoriously sober” General Stanley McChrystal, who was reported as having said: “This is a war zone – not an amusement park.” Closing the fast-food outlets was an unpopular decision, since reversed. However it’s not so surprising that in any community of this size you will find at least a couple of artists. In this otherwise bleak environment, it’s probably the only mode of creative release available. That 06′s street art – or his tag – is permitted at all is itself unexpectedly humane.

It must seem to the readers of Iconophilia that I have an obsession with the floor plane.  But here’s a thing. There’s no way you can look at the installation of Quentin Sprague’s current exhibition at tcb (until 2nd April) without giving some time to an interpretation of the linoleum floor. That is, before you attempt to engage with the works of art. And then you’ll have to mentally Photoshop it away (and all the connotations it evokes, of institutional dining rooms, of Hay Plains service stations, of, you tell me…) before you can attend to the works themselves. But first you have to look very closely, to make sure the artist hasn’t sneakily integrated the design…

But no, there’s no alignment to the past history of the room. There is, however, all kinds of suggestive alignments to the recent past of art history. Thus the limitations of such art experienced as mere reproduction. So what have we missed?

What were they like? Is crossing open ground a form of homage to Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Concept paintings, or was there something else happening, when experienced face-to-face? So who would like to write about this show, to talk us through it?

(crossing open ground, 2010-11, enamel on Aluminium, gunshots, wood. photo: Christian Capurro)

PS. QS is a contributor to Iconophilia.

According to this account, this photograph taken from Bahrain TV via Associated Press Television News on Friday, March 18, 2011 shows the rubble from the base of the Pearl Square monument, in Manama, Bahrain.  On Friday Bahrain authorities tore down the 300-foot (90-meter) monument at the heart of the square now purged of Shiite protesters, erasing a symbol of an uprising that has inflamed sectarian tensions across the region. Apparently the symbolism of the pearl refers to when the kingdom and its wealth was based – more modestly – on  the pearl industry. Now that the royal inheritance is on the nose, nobody wants to be reminded of the good old days…

You can find a better sequence of images, and a more nuanced commentary, by Michael Shaw, at BagNews here.

In another age, it was Courbet and his revolutionary mates who were responsible for the toppling of this other symbol of royal authority, the Vendome Column in Paris, in 1871. In this instance, the suppression of the revolution forced Courbet to flee to exile in Switzerland, lest he be presented with the bill for its reconstruction. He died in exile.

Or, as rendered by Isidore Pils (The Fall of the Vendome Column, 29th May, 1871).

PS. And here’s the other side of the coin, in Deraa, Syria, from BagNews.

“What’s the color of the wind?” Such are the questions the mini-poet Ned Moore Bonyhady asks. And such are the qualities of the works of art that have motivated our qualophile Matthew Shannon, who is the curator of Margaret Seaworthy Gothic. Which is? It’s the title of the current exhibition at the VCA’s Margaret Lawrence Gallery, with works by Colin Duncan, Nigel Lendon, Andrew Liversidge, Dane Mitchell, and Matthew Shannon himself.

What follows is Matthew’s account:

Margaret Seaworthy Gothic is the custom typeface Lawrence Weiner created and has used in his text works since 1968. It’s a bold sans serif, a bit like Impact, and is not open for the public to license or use.

Weiner’s early texts works made use of default typefaces used in sign writing, Franklin Gothic Extra (the default typeface on pre cut letters available at stationery stores) and FF Offline (a default typeface sometimes used for stencils).  These fonts are obviously potent with a burdensome context, they speak of Fordism and in general aesthetics of standardisation that grew out of the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas. Weiner’s concerns, however, at the time of designing the Margaret Seaworthy Gothic, were more immediate: how to escape the signature association of his work with these default typefaces and how to stabilise the context of his work.

By creating his own typeface, Weiner created a context of pure signature – one, however, not wholly devoid of a relationship to Weiner’s thinking, with its keen interest in Wittgenstein and Freud. Margaret Seaworthy Gothic individualises the body of Weiner’s work within the context of the 20^th Century, not simply as a signifier of its geist.

As an artist intrinsically associated with the period, it may seem strange that Weiner has always argued against his work being considered ‘Conceptual Art’; rather, he sees himself resolutely as a sculptor (and, in his words, his work can ‘fuck up your life’). What’s implicit in this way of thinking is that ‘language can represent material without explicit form’ [fn]. As such, words can be as potent in representing, for example, wood as a piece of wood itself. Wood comes forth from the letter forms that make up the word in the same way as the physiological effect of a lover’s presence can be conjured from seeing their name written – their presence coming through the kerning and spacing of the letters. Maybe it could be said it is only in the context of art and love, where the separation of left and right hemispherical brain function is so collapsed, that letter forms can provoke the qualia of a physical presence.

It’s this channelling and conjuring capacity, the magic of translating, that brings the artists Colin Duncan, Nigel Lendon, Andrew Liversidge, Dane Mitchell and myself together. Each work in this show in its own way occupies the gallery as a conceit of relationships, a cybernetic atmosphere and a theatre of aliases. Matter is not banished in the world, but it does take on spooky properties – its scale and identity having been permanently displaced by the network of communications within which it exists.

Colin Duncan’s flat two-dimensional high reliefs render the history of art into a new kind of wingdings; each one is a communicational icon, much like an emoticon, that condenses a huge amount of information into one ultra-recognisable form. These works communicate the entire existence of another work into a complete signifier and, writ large, they fill the gallery with the presence of works that are far removed.

Nigel Lendon’s air works, Maquette for an Invisible Sculpture (1993-2011) and Untitled Invisible Work of Art (2011) [above], directly affect the gallery’s breathable atmosphere, carving in it invisible forms that can only be felt. The architecture of the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, the life sustaining air it contains and Nigel’s work merge as one succinct system of interdependence.

Andrew Liversidge’s molten forms made from $1,000 worth of one dollar coins (the artist’s fee) fugues the form of money, turning it back into mere nickel, copper and aluminium alloy – from gold into lead. The actual value of this alloy, know as a ‘melt value’, is roughly $0.01 per $1 coin. Only the circumstance of a system of shared values allows such magical inflation – almost literally turning lead into gold. By taking the alloy of money as a sculptural material, this work transforms financial currency into an artistic one; a transmutation of one economic structure into another, eradicating one value system and replacing it with another through a crude modification of form.

Dane Mitchell’s way-finding devices inscribed with ‘Do Not Enter’ rendered backwards work directly on the institution of a gallery as public space, where the behaviour of the crowd needs to be choreographed with signage and controlled with surveillance cameras along with specialist staff members. Galleries are spaces where the crowd is free to roam, within limits: they are spaces open to the public, but have codes and privacies that are indicative of the invisible structures that control the presentation of art. By reversing the word ‘Do Not Enter’, Dane puts the viewer on the inside of this system of control. Initially, this may seem overly critical of the institution and the audience’s place within it, however I keenly believe the work uses its gallery context to explore ideas around objective vantage point and certainty of presence.

My work – the Manga comic about the white paint that is the default setting of all gallery walls –  highlights the paint itself to probe its infinite depth as a surface, to see its body come to life. In cybernetics every ‘body’ is in commutation with another; there are no inactive elements, no silences. It seems there is an implicit relationship with Conceptual Art of the twentieth century: when art becomes information, every contextual dimension becomes information, too (hence Lawrence Weiner’s struggle with pre-existing typefaces.) And, in much the same way, each of the works in Margaret Seaworthy Gothic seeks to animate the information in what appears to be silence.

Works illustrated above:

Dane Mitchell: Stanchion 1-5, 2011, Chrome plated steel, mylar, laser prints

Colin Duncan: Shadow, Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson, 1915, 2006, Acrylic

Nigel Lendon: Untitled Invisible Work of Art, 2011, Radial fans, motion sensors

Andrew Liversidge: FOR THE AVOIDANCE OF DOUBT (QUID PRO QUO AND THE GOLDEN TORPOR), 2011, 92% copper, 6% aluminium, 2% nickel

Matthew Shannon: Weave and Gravity, 2011, Risograph prints

footnote: Weiner, Lawrence. ‘Interview: Lawrence Weiner.’ Artkrush Issue #73.  2007. Flavourpill. 8^th December 2010 <http://artkrush.com/155783>

Photographs by Pamela Faye and Christian Capurro.

Next Thursday the exhibition Margaret Seaworthy Gothic will open at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery at the Victorian College of the Arts. The title, according to curator Matthew Shannon, is a form of homage to the venerable conceptual/textual artist Lawrence Weiner‘s need to invent his own unique font – called Margaret Seaworthy Gothic – so that his art would never be confused with mere communication. The exhibition will comprise works by Colin Duncan, Andrew Liversidge, Dane Mitchell, Matthew Shannon, and yes your iconophile. Yes indeed. The author of this drawing, Oslo Davis, is clearly on the case.  Next week I’ll bring you installation pix plus Shannon’s exegesis.

Jack Featherstone’s recent illness left him immobilised for a period of time. But he says it was his capacity to remember his favourite music that kept him going. Once he was back in action, he reflected on his experience. This is his vision of Handel’s Messiah. As you see, the judges at the Canberra Show showered it with plaudits.

…and they blend with the slate floor. So says the Director of the National Gallery of Australia, Ron Radford, in his justification of the redesign of The Aboriginal Memorial. Well, true, but surely there’s much more to it than that? Loyal readers of Iconophilia will recall that on December 10th last year I published a letter I had written to him two months previously, asking a number of questions about the decision-making and consultative process which had led to the installation of The Aboriginal Memorial in its current guise. This was my original letter:

12^th October, 2010

Ron Radford, AM

Director,

National Gallery of Australia

GPO Box 1150, Canberra, ACT, 2601

Dear Ron,

May I ask of you a couple of questions? I’m writing a piece on the new installation of The Aboriginal Memorial, and I would like to be sure I have my facts straight.

1. Whose idea was it, and who approved the introduction of the new material as a groundbase for the Memorial?

2. What was the consultation process with the artists and their heirs, at what stage of the design development, and with whom?

3. Has there been a “singing-in” ceremony, as with all the other relocations and rearrangements, (with the exception, I understand, of St Petersburg)? If so, by whom, and when?

Your reply will be much appreciated

With best wishes

Nigel Lendon

In the four months since this letter, there have been many posts and commentary on Iconophilia, and elsewhere. Now a reply has arrived. I reproduce it in full below. There are so many aspects to his account one scarcely knows where to begin. So, for the time being, I leave it to my readers to decide whether it is a satisfactory account of the processes and decisions that have led to the current manifestation of The Aboriginal Memorial.

P.S.If you’re new to this thread on Iconophilia, type Memorial in the search box at the top of the side bar and press Return to go to the other posts and comments on this topic.

P.P.S. Two months ago I first published my original letter, and in frustration, a hypothetical response, here.

On 6th November last year Djon Mundine gave a talk at the National Gallery of Australia about the place of The Aboriginal Memorial in the context of contemporary Indigenous art, following its relocation and redesign in the new wing. One of his key claims was that the historical moment of transition between art museums’ treatment of Aboriginal artefacts as works of art coincided with the recognition of authorship. According to this criterion, Indigenous artefacts in museum collections were recognised as works of art by the act of naming their authors.

In the discussion that followed his talk, one of the members of the audience noted that the 43 artists who created The Aboriginal Memorial were not named, which, by Djon’s criterion, called into question the status of the Memorial as a work of art. Both Djon and the Senior Curator, Francesca Cubillo seemed to agree that this was a problem which should be fixed. Two months later, all that has been changed is the addition of a short wall-text edited from an excellent brochure, written by Susan Jenkins in 1997 (which did name all the artists). The new additional wall-text reads:

The Aboriginal Memorial

The Aboriginal Memorial is an installation of 200 hollow log ceremonial coffins from Central Arnhem Land. The Aboriginal Memorial was created for the National Gallery of Australia in 1988 in response to the Bicentenary of Australia, a celebration of 200 years of European settlement. The path through the Memorial imitates the course of the Glyde River estuary which flows through the Arafura Swamp to the sea. The hollow log coffins are situated broadly according to where the artists’ clans live along the river and its tributaries.

The Aboriginal Memorial was conceived by Djon Mundine, a member of the Bundjalang people of northern New South Wales and at the time art adviser in Ramingining in Central Arnhem Land. Originally Mundine approached a small group of Senior artists including Paddy Dhatangu, George Malibirr, Jimmy Wululu and Dr David Daymirringu. However the project grew to include forty three male and female artists from Ramingining and its surrounds in Central Arnhem Land.

The Aboriginal Memorial with its 200 hollow log coffins – one for each year of European settlement, in the words of Mundine, represents a forest of souls, a war cemetery and the final rites for all indigenous Australians who have been denied a proper burial.

In 1987 the National Gallery of Australia agreed to commission this installation to enable the artists, most of whom were professional painters, sculptors and weavers, to complete the project. The Aboriginal Memorial was initially shown at the Biennale of Sydney in 1988. It was then brought to Canberra where it is now permanently displayed in the National Gallery of Australia.

The Aboriginal Memorial marks a watershed in the history of Australian society. Whilst it is intended as a war memorial, its is also a historical statement, a testimony to the resilience of Indigenous people and culture in the face of great odds, and a legacy for future generations of Australians.

The label remains the same, which itself perpetuates a historical mis-attribution. If you go to the website – here – to find the artists’ locations, clans, names, and stories, you will see that a significant proportion of the work was made by artists who live/lived somewhere other than Ramininging.

Elsewhere, the Gallery claims The Aboriginal Memorial as “one of the most important works of art in the national collection”.

Yet the question remains: does the absence of attribution – the artists’ names on the label which accompanies the work – render ambiguous the status of The Aboriginal Memorial as a work of art?

P.S. As noted in an earlier post, the right of attribution is recognised within Moral Rights legislation in Australia. And see other related confusions at the NGA here.

P.P.S. Links to the thread on this topic may be found here. Or type Memorial in the search box.

P.P.P.S. And for a wider perspective, read Melinda Hinkson (who describes herself – in this instance – as a “disgruntled anthropologist”) on the NGA’s lack of a relational approach to its presentation of Indigenous art. You can download her on-the-button essay from Arena 109 here: For Love and Money.

P.P.P.P.S. You can find the NGA’s own YouTube video here, which in a new description gives a account of funerary practices in the present tense, as if that is the way burial ceremonies still take place. A more nuanced account might say: “In the past…” or “Traditionally…” Otherwise, aren’t we getting a little more ethnographic than the Director might like?

STOP PRESS: 27 June 2011. At last the National Gallery of Australia has taken a step toward remedying the problems outlined above. It has only taken seven months.

But wait! Naming the artists is one thing. But it perpetuates the myth that these are all artists from Ramingining. Ramingining artists and others is the more accurate attribution.

At last the Australian equivalent of Picasso’s Guernica has been recognised by the National Gallery of Australia as the preeminent work of art of the Australian colonial era.

Another P.S.: Let’s see how long it takes to make some corrections? Jimmy Moduk is listed twice, Neville Nanytjawuy is missing.

In keeping with the nation’s passion for the tourist art category of Big Things (Banana, Pineapple, Merino, Crayfish, Trout etc.), one of the features of the new wing of the National Gallery of Australia is a very large mandjabu (fishtrap). Because the photography of works of art is prohibited inside the NGA, I can’t show you an image of it. Neither can I show you what’s on the website:

All works and information that appear on [the] NGA website do so with the consent of the artist/s or copyright holder. No image or information displayed may be reproduced, transmitted or copied (other than for the purposes of private research and study) without the NGA’s permission. Contravention is an infringement of Australia’s Copyright Act 1968.

In any case, the only image of the big mandjabu I could find on the site is this partial snap on the NGA’s Flickr photostream here, where works of art from the collection are represented in a much less formal manner.

However this artefact is arguably an exception to this prohibition. That is, if it doesn’t have an author in the manner of other works of art, it’s not really a work of art. This gigantic aluminium artefact is suspended in the vault above the shop entrance and the cloak room. From the little the NGA tells you, its origins and authorship are proving to be somewhat mysterious. When the new extension first opened the label attributed authorship to the folks that made it (Urban Art Project Foundry) with the sub-text that it was “based on” an original dated c.1955 in the collection by an “Unknown Artist”.

Clearly a Foundry is not an Artist. Recently, however, new labels have been affixed to the walls which give the attribution in a different way. The “author” is now an “Unknown MAKER” and it is based on an original fishtrap in the collection, now dated c. 1995. The revised date makes more sense, given that the settlement of Maningrida hardly existed in 1955. Presumably the “original” is this one, acquired in 2006. Or there’s another example in the collection, this time with much better provenance. The replica is not listed in the collection database.  So, if it’s not a work of art, it’s something else, which surely poses other problems for the nation’s premier art museum.

Given this evolving ambiguity, I went to the Urban Art Projects site, where you will find plenty of images, plus some words of explanation from the Director, Ron Radford, who tells us:

The fish trap is based on a 1950s Maningrida fish trap and UAP have been able to interpret and enlarge the original woven piece into a stunning 12 metre long intricate metal work. The fish trap is a feature work in the atrium and the shadow pattern it produces is almost as beautiful as the work itself.

By UAP’s own account, the work was “curated by the NGA”. You can even watch its time-lapse construction on YouTube here. Fascinating.

The question remains, who is the author of this feature work? It seems almost inconceivable that if the original fishtrap from Maningrida was made in circa 1995 it could lose the attribution of the artist who made it. Whatever the circumstances of the acquisition of the original, with a little research the problem of authorship could have been easily solved, surely, and permissions for a named (or attributed) replica negotiated. However when you go to the UAP site (but not the NGA site) you find that it was produced in collaboration with the Maningrida artist George Ganyjbala:

The Maningrida fish trap is an important sculptural commission and presents a contemporary interpretation of a traditional woven fish trap from the Maningrida Aboriginal community in Australia’s Northern Territory. Works of art from Maningrida carry a strong reputation and are represented in collections nationally and internationally. UAP’s design team travelled to the Northern Territory to work with George Ganyjbala, Maningrida elder and skilled fish trap maker and his family.

So while there was a UAP “design team” who “interpreted” the “original” in collaboration with George Ganyjbala, the author of the original remains unknown. Who would know?  Maningrida Arts and Culture is one of the most professional art centres in the country, which has paved the way in the attribution of artefacts other than paintings and sculptures as the work of individual artists. In the nineties there were several well-known artists who made mandjabu, among other things, for sale at MAC. As do a number of contemporary artists today. However, surprisingly, MAC is not mentioned anywhere in this thread.

If research, discussion, permission, or commission with the the original artist (or their heirs) was a part of the process of curation, why are they not named or attributed by the NGA? In the absence of such a curatorial process, is it the NGA that is the “author” of this “feature work”, by default? Whose idea was it? Who had carriage of its production? So long as the replica’s authorship remains unresolved, or unrecognised, so does its ambiguous status as a work of art. Not. Which means, among other things, I should have been allowed to photograph it.